There are two functional Paraview installations:

1. A standard binary distribution Paraview-4.3.1 in /apps/chpc/compmech/ParaView-4.3.1-Linux-64bit/bin
2. A custom compiled Paraview-5.0.1 in apps/chpc/compmech/CFD/Paraview/bin

Both of these are also available as modules, please use module avail. Please refer to the Paraview web site for instructions on using Paraview. For interactive graphics, an OpenGL-enabled environment will be required, therefore refer to the page on Remote Visualization for instructions on setting up a connection to the visualization node, and running Paraview with the VirtualGL wrapper. Paraview is an extremely versatile post-processor, and can be used as the primary visualization tool for a very wide range of applications and file formats, including OpenFOAM, MFix, SU2 and many others.

Parallel really comes into its own when it can make use of parallel processing (hence Paraview rather than Serialview, presumably). Limited testing has been done with the standard binary distribution of Paraview-5.3.0, which is installed in /apps/chpc/compmech/ParaView-5.3.0_bininstall. There is a module for it, module load chpc/compmech/Paraview/5.3.0 will set up the appropriate environment. There are several ways in which this version of Paraview can be used:

1. Run on a viz node (chpcviz1 or chpclic1) in single processor mode
2. Run in parallel on viz node
3. Run with dataserver parallel on a compute node, and the front end and render server in single process mode on a viz node
4. Run with dataserver parallel on a compute node, render server in parallel on the viz node and the front end on the viz node
5. Run with dataserver parallel on a compute node, render server in parallel on the viz node and the front end somewhere else

Not all of these methods work yet, but the ones that do, need the module loaded in each shell from which the process will be started.

Load the module, and type vglrun paraview at the command prompt.

• Open two terminals. Load the module in each.
• In one terminal, enter the command: vglrun mpiexec -np 6 pvserver –mpi –use-offscreen-rendering
• In the other, start paraview with vglrun paraview, then connect to the server (you have to set it up first in the connect menu). Then open your parallel data set. If your dataset is not inherently parallel, there is no point in using parallel visualisation. In OpenFOAM, leave your case decomposed, use the touch bananas.foam trick and load up the case as decomposed.
• Please do not use more than 6 parallel processes on the current viz nodes, which are interim stop-gap servers.
• Do monitor (with top or htop) the load on the servers, and avoid overloading them. In due course, a more formal queue for visualisation and better servers will be established.